From SylvainR - Grand Fleet (129 points)

♪♪ Yo ho ho, ♪♪ and a bottle of rhum ♪♪

I already discussed how I acquired these ships in a previous post. Now I would like to present the opponent of the Hochseeflotte, the Grand Fleet. Again, these are mostly capital ships of the armored cruiser class of bigger. If I had all the big German ships, this time, a few hulls are missing, in particularly HMS Canada. Anyway, here is what I have.

In line for the annual Coronation Fleet Review.

In the above picture, each ship at the beginning of a line is the leader of her class, followed by her sister ships. Again, I opted to use a medium base for ships of 25,000 tons or less. I'm very happy with the way this fleet turned out, despite the proverbial lack of details on CinC models. And the bases feel just right, with a feeling of sailing over a deep sea.

Race you to the finish line!

Here is a column of battleship class leaders. The only one missing, at the very top, would be HMS Dreadnought. At the bottom, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Revenge , along with all their sister ships, would all survive the Great War to fight into the next one, where they would know various fates. As was the case with German battleships, with each new class the ships would not get much longer but would get bigger guns and better armor.

British battlecruisers would  get longer with each new class. The bottom ship, HMS Courageous, along with her sisters HMS Furious and HMS Glorious ,would all be converted into aircraft carriers in the mid-twenties.

Two classes of cruisers. I will need to buy a lot more of these, along with many destroyers, to have all the necessary units to play Jutland or any other "what if" scenarios of Great War naval.

Two oddities before concluding this post. HMS Erin was originally built for the Ottoman empire under the name Reşadiye, but was duly seized by the British in 1914 and renamed. Same for the extravagant HMS Agincourt, originally built as Rio de Janeiro for the Brazilian government who wanted something both spiffy and macho, so why not request seven double turrets? Everybody wanted a British battleship in those days.

There are 43 ships in this lot. At 3 points each, it sums up to 129 points, which will also count toward my naval duel with MilesR.

Thanks.


From DaveD
Aah what a fine set of Castles of the Sea you present us with... your fleet review picture is great. So we are off and running Saturday gang...